You have to hand it to Brangelina: They work on the red carpet as a person, adopted half the world, and build houses for victims of Hurricane Katrina in the Lower Ninth Ward, and make films about the 'positively retro BiH conflict, a war that has often been usurped by cooler, genocide comparable to Uganda and Sudan.
In the Land of Blood and Honey could be the last movie you expect to come from a large starlet with unlimited resources at his disposal like Angelina Jolie. And yet, his directorial debut is engaged, disturbing film - with the atmosphere of European art exchange rate - about a conflict most of us have forgotten. History likes to talk about the Holocaust as an end game evil, but the Bosnian war from 1992 to 1995 showed that civilized people who commit horrific acts in the name of ethnic purity is as cyclical as the rising and sunset.
In the Land of Blood and Honey opens like the beautiful Bosnian Muslim painter Ajla (Zana Marjanovic) has an appointment in a crowded nightclub with Serb policeman Danijel (Goran Kostic). Both are clearly deeply in love. Four months later, all normality collapsed and the country plunged into a nightmarish civil war: An army of Serb soldiers began its process of "ethnic cleansing" of Muslim citizens, twisted revenge for a bloody history of conflict between Serbia's war ethnic factions.
Shot in the Bosnian language, with a cast of largely unknown actors in the region, in the Land of Blood and Honey flavor of the truth of the. Muslim residents became captives in their own apartment. Any attempt to leave to find food or drugs means they will be ripped off by snipers waiting to kill them. In a survey of Muslim young men are removed and immediately shot within earshot of women, who hate to longer in the store. The soldiers around a group of them, including Ajla, to serve as cooks, maids, laundresses and sex slaves.
With a horror reminiscent of the tactics of the concentration camps of Nazi soldiers, the Serbs torment, rape and humiliate women trapped in their camp and nightmarish. Ajla is spared the worst of it is because Danijel is now a Serbian soldier in the camp. It is in the uncomfortable place to be a pacifist at heart, reluctant to shoot any civilians Sniper Duty its requirements, but he has a father warlord, General Nebojsa (Rade Serbedzija), which reduced a virtual impossibility. Danijel Ajla protects, but also sets up the strange, troubling to negotiate played in the film. Its protection is wrapped in a sexual and romantic relationship that seems unbalanced at best. It is a heavy psychological situation becomes even more sinister later.
Ajla escapes rape camp and reunites with her sister and fellow Bosnian-Muslims. But when Danijel learns of her whereabouts, he sends for her, under the pretext of wanting an artist to paint his portrait. The couple again enter into a relationship with a background of handling and control. Danijel Ajla keeps secreted away in the rooms in a Serbian military complex. A horrible situation to implode, it is surrounded by Serb soldiers who do not hesitate to rape or kill their Muslim enemies and to question the relationship of their commander with this "enemy" women.
In a scenario very intelligent who also wrote Jolie, she designed a war movie that could have been a succession of battles and violence increasingly depraved in the realm of a psychological drama. And as a war film made by a woman with a demonstrated interest in humanitarian causes, in the Land of Blood and Honey is also a passionate tract on the use of grotesque sexual violence against women as a common tactic in modern warfare.
How you feel about the end of the film depends on your perception of the love story at the center of the film disturbing. The unequal relationship between the powerless, trapped Ajla and Danijel powerful, which holds life and death in his hands, complicates the notion of a love affair in wartime. The complexity of the Bosnian conflict is illustrated by the strange captive-and-sensor relationship that develops between two people who love each other openly, but can not escape from under the burden of history and ethnicity . Ultimately, in the Land of Blood and Honey is a surprisingly ambitious, nuanced study of the collision of human psychology with the presumed black and white lines of war. All of a Hollywood actress glamourzon you would not, frankly, expect it.
Sources: Charlestoncitypaper
No comments:
Post a Comment